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Auto Email
Version 1.1.0.0
Setup and User Manual
For Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Last Update: August 25, 2018
Contents Description ...................................................................................................................................... 3 Technical Concept ........................................................................................................................... 3 Auto Email License .......................................................................................................................... 3 Setup of Auto Email ........................................................................................................................ 3
SMTP setup ................................................................................................................................. 4 Important note on SMTP services .......................................................................................... 4
Auto Email Setup ......................................................................................................................... 5 Customer/Vendor Setup ............................................................................................................. 7
Job Queue Setup ..................................................................................................................... 7 Permissions ................................................................................................................................. 8
User Manual .................................................................................................................................... 9 Special emails ............................................................................................................................ 10
Email Customer Statement ................................................................................................... 11 Run the Statement report ..................................................................................................... 12 Email Collection .................................................................................................................... 12
Auto Email Log File ........................................................................................................................ 13 Debug Mode ................................................................................................................................. 13 Auto Email Customer Statements ................................................................................................. 13 Trial Period and Activating/Renewing a Subscription .................................................................. 18 Customer Support and Request for new features ........................................................................ 19
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Description Automatically email sales and purchase documents to customers and vendors without any effort.
Send a collection email to a customer that includes a statement and all supporting documents with one click.
Remind customers of they have short‐paid or have no‐paid invoices with a single click.
Send monthly statement to all customers automatically and without user interaction.
Review email log to see when emails were sent and by whom.
Save hours every day having Auto Email do the hard work of collecting documents, writing email bodies, emailing and storing evidence that emails were sent.
Send default attachments with sales and purchase documents. Auto Email is simple to use and saves you a lot of time. Auto Email is a solution that makes it effortless to send out emails and at the same time release the user immediately even when sending 1000s of emails. The solution uses an email log to place all the emails in and let Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central do the rest of the work. Auto Email can also be set to automatically email invoices and credit memos as they are being posted. For accounts receivable, Auto Email can send customer statements and collection notices with all open and past due invoices and credit memos at a single click of a button and if a customer short‐paid an invoice Auto Email can send a notice to the customer about that too.
Technical Concept Auto Email is using an email queue to log the emails in and the Job Queue to process the emailed documents. Auto Email has an entry log that is populated every time a document is submitted to be emailed. The Job Queue will check the log every X minutes and if there are entries that have not been emailed Business Central will automatically start emailing the documents until all have been emailed. The log will be updated once the document has been emailed with a status to ensure that the document is not emailed again. This means that there is nothing emailed from the client and the user is instantly released on the document has been submitted.
Auto Email License Auto Email can be acquired as an App in the Extension Market Place inside Business Central. Just click Free trial to install and try out the solution. The trial will last for 30 days. A subscription can be purchased from SimCrest.
Setup of Auto Email There are a couple of steps needed in order for Auto Email to work.
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SMTP setup For Business Central to email via SMTP, you will have to specify an SMTP server. Search for SMTP Mail Setup.
Specify the server’s IP address or name. You may have to consult with your IT administrator to get this information. Test the setup before you continue.
Important note on SMTP services
The SMTP service is of the outmost importance. Many SMTP services may have issues sending emails consistently and securely, so we recommend getting an SMTP service from Sendgrid (www.sendgrid.com). They will also provide additional information about your emails, like if they were received and opened by the end user. Here is an example of a report from Sendgrid:
At the time of writing this manual, Sendgrid offers a free service with up to 12,000 emails per month.
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Auto Email Setup You will also have to set up Auto Email to be able to email documents. Search for “Auto Email Setup”. The setup table is populated during the installation.
Here is an explanation for all the fields:
Report Nos. Specify the report numbers for the reports that you like to attach to the emails for each document type. Auto Email defaults some popular report numbers, but you should adjust them according to your company’s requirements.
Send from Email Address This is the email that will show as the sender of all emails sent via Auto Email. Make sure it’s a valid company email address. The SMTP server will likely have an issue if the Send From Email Address is not in your company’s domain.
Debug Mode, Debug To Email If Debug Mode is checked, all emails will be send to the Debug To Email regardless of documents sent. This is used for testing that email’s and document’s look right before you start sending to customer and vendors.
Email Invoices When Posting If checked, invoices will be emailed automatically when they are posted. Make sure the customer is setup to receive documents via email. See Customer Card.
Email Cr.Memos When Posting If checked, credit memos will be emailed automatically when they are posted. Make sure the customer is setup to receive documents via email. See Customer Card.
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Statement To‐date Formula This information is needed for the Auto Email Statement report. The formula is used to determine if a customer have a balance due as of the date calculated using this formula in relation to Today’s date. Example. Today = 05/05/19. If the formula is ‘‐1M+CM’ the balance as of 04/30/19 is used to determine if the customer has a balance as of this date. If so, the statement will be emailed. If not, the statement for this customer is skipped.
Body Texts Specify the texts that will go into the bodies of the different email types. For all document types of the body texts you can specify %1 to insert the relevant document number. The text is sent in HTML format so you can use HTML tags to change the appearance of the text. Use <br> for line break.
Here is an explanation for all actions:
Process Emails When clicked, Auto Email will simulate running the job queue and should usually only be used for testing.
Subscription This is used to activate or renew a subscription. See later in this document how to do this.
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Customer/Vendor Setup On the customer/vendor card, the Auto Email information is found on the Invoicing tab. Here you will specify, for each customer/vendor, if they should have documents emailed or not.
A check mark in Email Documents is used to indicate that the customer/vendor will receive documents via email rather than printed and mailed. You have to have Email To filled out. ccEmail and bccEmail are optional. You can specify several addresses by separating them with semicolon (;) and no spaces.
Job Queue Setup You will have to set up the Job Queue. Search for “Job Queue Entries”.
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Create a new entry and set it up to run Codeunit 70163325 (Auto Email Management). Set the recurrence to your preference. We suggest emailing every 5 minutes, but that can be adjusted up or down as needed. Once you have tested the solution thoroughly, Set Status to ready.
Permissions A permission set for Auto Email is created when the Extension is installed. It’s called ‘SIMCREST AUTO EMAIL’.
Assign this permission set to all the users that should have access to Auto Email.
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User Manual The ability to email documents has been added to several pages (cards and lists):
Sales Quotes
Sales Orders
Sales Return Orders
Posted Sales Invoices
Posted Sales Credit Memos
Posted Service Invoices (only available in premium version)
Posted Service Credit Memos (only available in premium version)
Purchase Orders Once you click the Email button, you will see the queued message:
The Show Email Log button, will show all the related log entries for the document you are standing on. Here is an example for a Sales Order.
The Process Emails action can be used to force the emails to be sent, if you can’t wait for the Job Queue to process them. This is usually only used for testing. Here is an example how the sales order would look like in the email:
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Special emails Short‐paid/Non‐paid invoices. You can email a short/non‐paid notice. If the invoice is past due and the original amount is the same as the past due amount, Auto Email will send a non‐paid email with the invoice attached. Use the Non‐Paid body text in Auto Email Setup to tell the customer whatever you like. If the invoice is partially paid, Auto Email will send a short‐paid notice (also with invoice attached) using the short‐paid body text in Auto Email Setup for this purpose. Short‐paid notices can be sent from posted invoices and the customer ledger.
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Email Customer Statement
On the customer card and the customer ledger you have the option to send a statement.
One caveat about the customer statement is that it requires some values on the request page before it will run. For Auto Email to set these settings, you can must specify these settings first BEFORE you can email customer statements using Auto Email. Go to Customer Card and click on the Report tab in the ribbon at the top of the screen:
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Run the Statement report
The dates are mandatory to be filled out. The Report Output should be set to PDF. Fill out the rest of the fields as you like. Click OK to accept and check if the statement has the information you like. Repeat until the statement is acceptable. Once done, you can start sending statements and collections (see more about collections below). The statements will use the values you set above until you change them. Make sure to revisit the request page for the statement report as often as needed.
Email Collection
A collection email is a special email that will send a statement (using the setting as described above) along with all the supporting documents (invoices and credit memos). On the customer card and the customer ledger you have the option to send a collection email.
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Auto Email Log File Auto Email maintains a log file that will show all the emails that was requested to be submitted with their status. Search for Auto Email Log.
You can use the log to find out if emails went out correctly and see if there is an error to be corrected. If there is an error, you typically must resolve the error. You can also check if the job queue has stopped due to an error. If it has stopped, you must resolve the error before you start the job queue again. You can delete entries in the log if you have the permission to do that.
Debug Mode In Auto Email Setup there is an option to put Auto Email in debug mode.
If checked, Auto Email, will send all emails to the “Debug To Email” address instead of the actual customers/vendors. This is useful when setting up Auto Email and checking that documents are showing up correctly in the emails. Just uncheck again when the system is tested and ready to go.
Auto Email Customer Statements Auto Email can send customer statements to all customers that have a balance due according to the date formula. Check the documentation for Auto Email Setup for more information. The
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customer must also be setup to receive documents via email (“Email Documents” on Customer Card.
To email the customer statement search for Auto Email Statements and run the report. Specify any filter you like to have on the customer number. Statement parameters will use the default setup for the customer statement report (must have been entered in advance; check the statement printing requirements mentioned earlier).
Once you run the report, statements will be queue for emailing.
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Auto Email Attachments Auto Email allows you to send default documents with the sales and purchase documents. Let’s say you like to send you “Terms and Conditions” and “Return Instructions” with all sales orders you email. Find the attachments page:
Here is the attachment table:
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Here are the fields used on the page:
Email Type Here you pick the document type you are emailing
Code This is a unique code used per email type
Description The description of the document
Attachment This will be checked if there is an attachment imported
Attachment Name This is the file name of the attachment. Make sure you include the extension (pdf, docx, xlsx, etc.). Do NOT include the full file path, only the name and extension.
Attachment Date/Time The date and time the file was loaded.
Active Click active to include this attachment for the email type selected. If unchecked, the attachment will NOT be emailed.
Load Attachment Create and new attachment:
Pick the Email Type and enter the code and description. Click Import attachment on the line just entered.
Pick the file and it loads into record we are entering. Make sure to enter the attachment name exactly like you want the customer to see the attachment. Do NOT include any file path.
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In the above case, two attachments will be sent with the sales order.
If you use the Export attachment, the file will be downloaded to your Downloads folder. If you like to delete the attachment, delete the entire record.
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Trial Period and Activating/Renewing a Subscription When you have installed Auto Email, it will automatically run for a trail period of 30 days. During that time, you are free to evaluate the solution and there are no restrictions to the version running under the trial period. Each time anyone logs into Business Central they will see a trial period message in their Role Center.
Once the trial period has expired, Auto Email will no longer send emails. To avoid that, you need to subscribe to Auto Email. Contact SimCrest to purchase a subscription. You can click the “Contact us” link in the message to send us a message (http://simcrest.com/ContactUs). Auto Email is licensed per company and is tied to the company name. You can see the company name in the Role Center when Business Central starts up (see above). Send the company name to SimCrest together with the request for a subscription. Subscriptions usually run for 1 year at a time but can be customized to your specific needs. Once purchased, SimCrest will issue you an activation code. Here is how to activate the subscription:
Go to Auto Email Setup and click Subscription
Paste the activation code into the field and click Activate Subscription
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Here is the resulting message
Customer Support and Request for new features If you have questions how to use Auto Email or have issues to report, we would love to hear from you. Please go to http://simcrest.com/ContactUs and send us a message. Use the same link if you like to request new features for Auto Email.
